I should clarify what an allegory is. An allegory is a story that uses an extensive amount of symbolism. It is similar to a parable but generally has an even greater degree of correspondence -- that is, most or many of the details in the story represent something or carry some specific nuance of meaning. One author defined it as "an extended metaphor -- that is, a number of elements in a story make up a string of metaphors which have a deeper unified meaning."
It's a literary technique. Some books can employ the technique to convey it's message (think: Pilgrim's Progress), so when one reads one of these books, they must read it as an allegory, not as history or as a historical novel.
The Bible uses allegory occasionally.
Isa 5:1-7, for example. So allegory is not a bad thing. It's another literary device used occasionally in the Bible to convey a message in a colorful way. However, allegorical
interpretation as an interpretive method is quite different from allegory, and it can mislead us completely if we use it to interpret a nonallegorical text. FEW texts in the Bible are allegorical.
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